This is all part and parcel of a larger clusterfuck; see the previous post in my journal for more. (I'll add that link above for the benefit of those joining us from rm's tweet.)

For contrast, if you search "homosexuality" at Amazon.ca, your top five hits are:

"Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You" by Peter Cameron (a novel about a gay man)

"The Gay Man's Kama Sutra" by Terry Sanderson (self-explanatory)

"Stories From the War on Homosexuality" (DVD)

"And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell, and Henry Cole (children's book featuring a gay penguin family)

and

"What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality" by Daniel A. Helminiak (a book debunking the fundamentalist use of the Bible as a weapon against gays)


I think the main point is that if the GLBT books that Amazon.com has labeled as "adult" were included in the search, the results would look far more like .ca's search result page.



(Edited for HTML fail)

Edited at 2009-04-12 11:10 pm (UTC)

But that still doesn't explain why half of Jacqueline Carey's Kusheline novels have no rank at all while the other half do. (A comment on meta_writer noted that at amazon.co.jp, whether or not the first book in the series had a rank depended upon the edition of the book you were looking at....)

EDIT: I'm using this as an example because if the ranks were simply based upon who was buying the books, I would expect sequels in a series to all be ranked similarly.

Edited at 2009-04-13 01:20 am (UTC)

The problem, as I posted about in my LJ, is that those books still have their sales ranks while they stripped the rank from What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, a book by a Catholic priest arguing that the Christian right's Bible-based condemnations of homosexuality are invalid.

That book has "homosexuality" in the title, but has been ruled "adult" by this policy.

I don't know that I buy it, either...but eldestmuse makes a point in the comments that I'm going to repost.

No, that was my fail - I moved the picture into a new folder, and it broke the original link. Fixed.

This is as official an explanation as the public has been given. However, we're now moving from #amazonfail into #apologyfail - as of this writing, the only people to receive the "embarrassing and ham-fisted" statement quoted here are people who wrote to complain about it in the first place. Apparently nobody in the PR department at Amazon has ever heard the old aphorism that one complaint letter represents ten people who feel the same way, but never actually said anything. Moreover, that statement contains NOTHING resembling an actual expression of regret that this occurred (and while other people on my f'list are of the opinion that a corporate entity is not obligated to apologize for human error, it would have cost them nothing and earned them considerable social capital to do so).